Eventtia Blog

You have an event to plan. You, along with multiple institutions and brands, understand the real power of event marketing, allocating significant time and resources to planning logistics. You might even have an in-house planning team (although they may not be professional planners) and agreed upon an event calendar that you’ll try to maintain during the year.

That’s all well and good; however, you’ll soon discover that planning something (or multiple brand events, if your company is big or you have an intense event schedule) requires loads of effort.

Apart from that, you might realize that your team doesn’t always have the necessary means or knowledge to achieve their full potential and streamline the planning workflow, which can lead to inefficiency and wasted resources.

So how can you improve your team’s planning workflow and make sure you get the desired results with less hassle and struggle?

Here are a few recommendations you may want to consider:

Tip #1. Get to know your team’s needs

If you aren’t directly involved with the event logistics or communication, you’ll miss important details regarding any challenges your planning team might have. Once the team starts to plan an event, they’re likely going to run into several issues.

From setting up a friendly website and designing registration forms to automating the invoice payments and agreeing upon the check-in procedure, they’ll encounter multiple obstacles.

Your first task is to understand where the team is struggling and work together to find the solutions. In other words, schedule an in-depth meeting with your team to discuss the entire event planning process and identify the pain points that, if eliminated, will improve the workflow.

Tip #2. Establish distraction-free communication

How your team works together to solve event logistics can affect the final results. This is even more important when the key operational members are part of different company teams (for example, if someone is part of the marketing department and others are from the administrative department).

They might be spending their entire day replying to emails, serving as nothing more than just information messengers. This approach will only distract them from designing awesome experiences for your future attendees.

Your responsibility is to provide a space (both physical and virtual) where your planning team can communicate with each other distraction-free.

For example, you could set up a dialogue platform (for example, on Slack) especially dedicated to event planning, or designate a room where your team can gather and tackle all the logistic aspects without any distractions.

Tip #3. Automate certain tasks

It’s erroneous to think that your team’s goal is to make sure the logistics are perfect. This would have been true years ago. Nowadays, the team’s mission is to focus on things like designing memorable event experiences, building a powerful event marketing strategy perfectly aligned with the brand’s goals, finding ways to capture leads during the event, setting up strategies that will lead to strong business relationships with the attendees, etc.

However, in most cases, the event logistics take up all the time and the resources, leaving no space for executing the strategic steps.

What should you do in this case?

Think about helping your team by automating some of the work. There are multiple event management platforms and digital tools that will help you do that. Conduct a marketing analysis (considering your team’s needs) and opt in for the solution that suits you best.

Tip #4. Go for a one-stop shop, instead of multiple tools

One thing that will help your team greatly is the ability to manage all the logistic digitization from just one dashboard. In other words, instead of purchasing multiple apps or platforms that solve one problem, it’s advisable to search for all-inclusive event management software.

The common mistake is to think that numerous one-solution apps or digital tools are better than one massive platform. This might be true for other industries or issues.

When it comes to event planning, however, there are software brands that consider the entire event logistic chain and provide the essential solutions and features to cover all the necessary aspects.

To streamline your team’s planning workflow, think about purchasing an all-in-one solution that handles all the event aspects and dimensions.

Tip #5. Help your team to set up a planning protocol

What steps does planning an event involve? What’s the first phase? What’s the second one? How should you conduct the marketing campaign?

When planning multiple events for a company or with the purpose to popularize one brand, there’s a specific protocol that needs to be followed. To streamline the planning efficiency of your event team, present a step-by-step protocol that will help everyone understand exactly what to do next.

Tip #6. Set up clear OKRs (objectives and key results)

Why are you planning these events in the first place? Are you trying to attract new prospects, or increase your business’ brand awareness, or maybe strengthen the loyalty of your existing clients? And most important, how do you plan to measure your events’ successes?

The answers to these questions will redirect your planning team’s effort toward achieving the right goals and knowing which objectives and key results to follow. This will give them a clear sense of purpose and the critical indicators to evaluate their own efforts.

Tip #7. Get your team to clone the previous event

Instead of planning a new event from scratch, think about giving your team the fundamental tools to mimic the previous event and just incorporate and adapt the new data to the event. This is possible thanks to event management platforms that allow teams to simply clone an existing event and create a new one.

Takeaway

Investing all of your time and efforts into ensuring perfect logistics isn’t the key to planning successful events. On the contrary, this aspect should occupy as few resources and hours as possible.

Your planning team, instead, should focus on developing a powerful event marketing strategy that is well aligned with your brand’s goals and build exciting experiences for your attendees so they’ll remember you.

To achieve these results, it’s crucial to streamline the planning workflow using different approaches and digital tools and allow your event team to focus on the things that truly matter.